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I obviously haven't posted to LJ in a long time, which is a bit of a shame happening so soon after I got a permanent membership. I tend to view writing in general, and LJ posting in particular, as an extremely large amount of work (at least in prospect) and thus don't do it. Lately I've been trying to treat DPB more like talking, resulting in my posting a lot more. I'm also on Twitter now, but the 140 character limit is a powerful disincentive to complex thought. This post will be mostly musings.

I realize a lot of the above may sound like complaining, and I don't want to give the impression that I'm miserable. I certainly wouldn't say that I'm thrilled about everything. But I once read a theory that each human has a given set point of happiness to which he will converge as long as his environment remains the same. That may be overstated, but it seems to have a kernel of truth. In that light I would say that I'm doing about as expected: that my stay in Dallas has been rather light on satisfaction but heavy on pay; that I'll try to manage my money (even in the current macroeconomic situation) well enough to set myself up in a situation that better meets my needs; and that hopefully I don't turn out to be quite as hard-to-accommodate-by-virtue-of-being-unusual as I sometimes worry I am.

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I found out two days ago that my cat Clyde had passed away. He had been living with my dad and Nance in Catskill.

[First digital picture I ever took]

[Probably the last picture of him, taken on the same camera, which I gave to my dad]

He had been sick, but I did not take it as seriously as I could have, since he's been sick in one way or another for most of his life and it rarely seemed to amount to much. He was about 10 years old.

Also, I'm back from a week in Alaska, which I may write about if I ever get the energy.

Current Mood: empty

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DPB-Con was a week ago now. In lieu of a narrative description of the entire event, which would be exhausting to read and very difficult to write, here are some of the things I did:

• Stayed up all night the Friday evening before so I could be sure not to miss my 7:00 flight
• Traveled with only my laptop bag and my max-size carry-on
• Ate great food without spending a cent (beyond the con fee) until the Friday night dinner
• Wore my bathrobe as clothing a lot
• Became reasonably familiar with at least 3 beachgoers / DPBers I hadn't really known previously
• Got up around 9:00—9:30 consistently, without an alarm
• Participated to a reasonable degree in 2 of the 3 big parties
• Played my first game of face-to-face Diplomacy, was the first eliminated, and fell asleep on the couch before the game ended, never finding out who won
• Played an epic 8 (7 once we lost one person) game of Arkham Horror, which we did finally win
• Participated in a level 1 World of Warcraft race (the first time I had ever played) and managed to finish despite horrible bear aggro
• Hung out in a pool the temperature of bathwater in the late evening; it took a lot of force of will to get out
• Spent the one day of lousy (rainy) weather mostly playing FFXI
• Spent the day after that (and also, not merely coincidentally, the day after the Outer Space Party) terribly hung over
• Got drunk on the beach on Jagermeister shots (and one beer)
• Swam in the ocean
• Waited until Thursday or Friday to realize that having a camera entailed some obligation to (or at least, benefit from) using it, and tried to make up for it by taking a crapload of pictures
• Played a little bit of Rock Band on easy and found it more doable than I expected
• Failed to carry my phone, send many emails or IMs, or interact much with the world away from the beach at all, and was perfectly happy with it that way
• Helped move stuff or clean up whenever I was asked to, which really didn't seem like much (official volunteerism crowding out unorganized volunteerism? lack of initiative on my part?)
• Found that my habitual ignorance of sunscreen was only so sustainable, and finally opted to borrow some for Friday on the beach
• Was switched to a direct flight on American to Dallas, due to the iffiness of Uniteds' flights to Chicago on that day
• Watched The Ultimate Gift in the airport and Capricorn One on the plane, and arrived home two hours earlier than previously scheduled
• Chilled out. Realized that these are an incredibly cool bunch of people who, if there's a reasonable way to make things work, will do so (all DPB-proper acrimony notwithstanding). Resolved to come again.

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It seems that only being on an airplane, with its combination of computer availability and lack of internet access, is able to convince me to write these entries any more. I don't remember exactly when I wrote my last entry, though I know I was pretty unhappy when I wrote it, and I'm fairly certain that both of my parents' visits to Dallas, as well as the Christmas vacation from which I am now returning, were after it.

And now, I am back in Dallas for two days, and then off to Pittsburgh for New Year's.

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As I write this, I am on a plane from Pittsburgh to Dallas. Carlson needed me to recruit at CMU, and I extended this into a vacation by taking off Monday, flying out Saturday and back Tuesday evening (the actual recruiting was today).

Well, there's my rant to make up for all that not posting. I should post more from now on, but don't count on it. Advice gladly accepted, though I'm starting to worry that more active intervention may be required. Or tell me what you've liked about me, 'cause my self-esteem is pretty weak right now and I could use a reminder of which of my characteristics to try to enhance.

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I had a brief moment, while riding the bus to the airport past the Fairfax (where Ratha lived, where I first visited her and where I briefly lived after moving in with her) of badly wanting to drop everything and move back to Pittsburgh. Which, as it turns out, is pretty much what Ratha did, and why she was there (a fact I can't claim to have been unselfconscious of). I kind of hope that these kinds of feelings increase in the future, eventually impelling me to action, because I don't really see myself growing roots in Texas, and neither do I see myself having a solid enough base on which to define and achieve my life goals without those roots somewhere.

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This won't cover as much as I had originally intended it to, but it's taking me a super long time to write, so let's just post this. Also, tangentially, I just bought a LiveJournal permanent account, basically because I'm sick of having to make the tough call whether to renew or not every year.

Overview: this year looks to be a big one for travel. Before the time period this post covers, I had already finished up my New Year's trip, gone to Pittsburgh for a quick recruiting trip, and visited Laura in DC. In this post, I go to my sister's graduation (and tack on a nice long vacation around Albany). Still to be covered: I take a long weekend trip to North Carolina. Still to happen: I'm briefly going to Pittsburgh the weekend before the 4th of July, and there looks to be a good chance of at least 2 if not 3 more plane trips this year.

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I'm putting this at the top, outside the cut, so I have a better chance of getting an answer. When you see a long entry (over 1000 words) like this one, do you generally read it right away, put it aside and maybe (or maybe not) get around to reading it later, skim it, or skip it entirely? Please comment; no need to read the rest of the post if you don't want to.

I'm not in as bad a mood as I was the last time I posted, though I've been feeling kind of inward-focused and passive this week. A bunch of stuff has happened that I haven't written about.

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Today was a crappy day.

• I had to go get blood drawn for an endocrinologist apppointment next week. Despite being right next to Nordstrom, where they were holding a shirt for me that I'd forgotten while shopping there the previous weekend, I couldn't pick it up because they weren't open yet.
• Nikolai sent a picture of me from college around the office. I didn't look that great at the time, and the picture (from 15-251) wasn't great even taking that into account. Truc was asking about it and I snapped at her, then told her to shut up when she kept asking. (Truc is totally oblivious socially.) Later she asked why I had snapped, but I ignored the question because I couldn't think of a reasonable way to explain it.
• The stocks I hold were down about 1%, I think because the Fed announced that they might raise or lower interest rates. Which is what I always thought they had said, but the market interpreted things differently. I hadn't wanted to sell though, due in large part to not wanting to pay short-term capital gains tax.
• Later in the afternoon we found out that Truc is leaving and her last day will probably be next Friday. This was a surprise since she had previously said that if Carlson made her a full-time offer (she's been contracting) she would probably take it.
• Got basically nothing done at work. Just never managed to make myself concentrate.
• After work, went to Nordstrom and finally picked up the shirt. Stopped at Borders on the way to Supercuts to pick up a Rolling Stone that Charlie had recommended because of a Hugh Laurie interview, but the only Rolling Stone I saw didn't have it. Probably waited too long on the tip.
• Got a haircut that's way shorter than I wanted. The guy was Hispanic and I don't think he understood what I was asking for, and I didn't realize what he was doing until it was too late. I didn't think he would understand if I explained, and in any case he couldn't have put hair back, so I just had him clean it up as much as possible given the shortness.
• And there's one more bad thing that I think will probably happen today, which I don't want to mention.

In other, non-crappy news, my car has over 250,000 miles now, and I'm visiting Laura this weekend.

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Things seem less deranged than they were the last time I wrote here, though still a bit uneasy. What's been occupying my mind lately is how “real” or not my experiences are. This is a bit hard to describe, but in some of my experiences I seem to be much more present, involved with what is going on, alert, to make better decisions, and to feel sensations and emotions more intensely. It's essentially the same as what I've called “intensity” in the past. As seems to be normal when I'm thinking about these issues, things have been more intense/real lately than they had been, though sometimes disturbingly unreal—I seem to have some control over this by selecting my environment (both the things around me and those inside my body), but little ability to affect it in the moment.

Concordant with this, I've had several very productive days at work in the past couple of weeks, and a very productive Saturday yesterday. I wrote some letters I'd been meaning to and mailed them, picked up my dry cleaning, went shopping, did my taxes, watched Sin City (would have been hard to be better at doing what it did) and IMd a bit, and had two adequate meals.

One of the places I shopped was Nordstrom, both because I could use some more work clothes and to “kick the tires” since I recently bought Nordstrom stock. I saw some evidence of their fanaticism, but only a little, perhaps since I'm comparing them to the Men's Wearhouse, and men's clothes are expensive enough (and probably have a high enough margin) for very good service to be common. I was surprised how much of the store was taken up by women's clothing, though in retrospect women shop so much more than men (especially for clothes) that it's not that odd. Ken also pointed out that they may be one of the companies to suffer more in a recession. I bought the stock when it had just plunged, but not at the very bottom—it seems to be extremely difficult to time the market perfectly (of course, I'm not trying to time it perfectly, just better than not at all). So I'm a little skeptical about them now—they're definitely a good company, but they may have gone as far as they can go in their segment. But I'll probably at least hold the stock until December, and then if it's down I can sell it and get a tax write-off.

I just re-watched The Prestige, which my sister gave me for my birthday. In lieu of ruining it, if you haven't seen it, do so. It's an easy five stars. (Unrelatedly, I finally subscribed to Netflix, and it's pretty much everything I hoped for. I have a queue of almost 100 movies, and I've only added 3 DVDs of TV shows so far—there are a lot more of those I can come up with.)

Next weekend my dad is visiting. The weekend after that I'm visiting Laura. Wait a month and a half and I'm going to my sister's graduation, then staying in upstate NY for the rest of the week. The weekend after that, I'm going to North Carolina for the high school graduation of one of my cousins, and to see a bunch of relatives I haven't seen in a long time. So the theme of the next while looks to be “travel”.

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So, not as much to write about the second half of my vacation, mostly because I did more or less the same things that I also did on my previous two vacations in Albany. I played cards and pool with my grandfather, dad, Nance, and/or Betsy. I visited Charlie and we somehow finished off an entire bottle of Damrak in one night (and Charlie later told me that I was responsible for about a third of that), and he made a very thick pasta which was still quite good if one treated it as noodles. He also gave me the uncouth yet surprisingly effective idea of smoking the stub of a cigar in one's pipe.

Probably the big event was the Hamm family Christmas on Saturday. I had tried to pick out individual presents for everyone who'd be there and badly failed, so I had instead decided to buy a bunch of stuff and use a ballot to decide who got what. Certain items were more targeted to certain people, but most of them were things I would have wanted myself (I did in fact end up claiming Napoleon Dynamite for myself, as I had bought one more present than necessary). My idea was a big hit.

After the party, I saw The Good Shepherd with my mom, Vic, and Betsy. I hadn't realized before we were getting ready to leave that it was three hours long. As has been the case with a lot of complex movies that I've seen lately, I wasn't quite able to follow every single point, though I got most of it. It was very engrossing. My other complaint, though it may seem trivial, is that although the story spans 20 years or so, Matt Damon's character never changes appearance all that much, and in the later parts he seems too young.

Then it was back to Dallas, where I was glad to have a long weekend at the end of the week, as I needed another vacation after dealing with all the stuff that had piled up during my first vacation.

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